“Something I hear very often is that RIM “failed to innovate” and that a “lack of innovation” led to the fix that RIM’s now in. Is it that simple? Did RIM fail to innovate?
I would not say that we failed to innovate. RIM is still a very innovative company. BlackBerry 10 will absolutely prove this. I think that the reason is something else. We had a very, very successful recipe of what BlackBerry was all about. There were four main pillars: battery life; typing; security; and compression. Then there was a shift with LTE. With LTE it was important actually not to save network resources, it was important to load the networks, to sell data plans and sell data volume. We didn’t miss on innovation. I think we missed on understanding, specifically in the U.S., that this trend was shifting, and that our positioning and our value proposition in the U.S. market was not following that trend shift.”
Blackberry succeeded even today when it comes to “…battery life, typing, security, and compression”. When it comes to the bring your own device wars at many jobs as nice as an iPhone or Android would be the pda functionality of blackberry is king. Now if i want apps (games etc) and a high tech browser browser then it would be Apple or Android. With Blackberry 10 OS the browser will be webkit based and modern like Android and iOS. With Android app compatibility BB10 may be quite the contender.
“What also happened, in the U.S., was the drive to 4G started, and it got accelerated. Carriers were actually leapfrogging from what they wanted to do with 3G, like HSPA+. They leapfrogged and put a lot of investment into 4G LTE. I think we weren’t ready for it. We were busy building our global portfolio. We had a slightly different view on when the LTE rollout would happen. And we made a decision to focus on the rest of the world,…”
via RIM CEO on What Went Wrong and the Future of BlackBerry CIO.com.
What are your thoughts on how RIM is doing and where they are going?